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The Syntax and Semantics of As-Parentheticals

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The Syntax and Semantics of As-Parentheticals CHRISTOPHER POTTS THE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF AS-PARENTHETICALS ABSTRACT. This paper is a detailed investigation of the syntax and semantics of a single type of cross-linguistically common parenthetical expression, here dubbed As- parentheticals (e.g., Ames, as you know, was a spy). I show that a treatment of such clauses as adverbial modifiers combines with a motivated semantic analysis to account for a wide range of ambiguities concerning negation in particular, but also tense, modal, and adverbial operators. I provide a principled explanation for the impossibility of variable binding into, and extraction from, As-parentheticals, and argue that this construction yields novel support for the view (of Ladusaw 1992, and others) that negative DPs like no one are actually non-negated indefinites licensed by an abstract, clause-level negation. Overall, the analysis shows that parentheticals, in addition to being a rich source of puzzles in their own right, provide a useful probe into clause structure in general. 1. INTRODUCTION Parentheticals, ubiquitous though they be, and absolutely vital to com- munication at all registers, have been sorely neglected by linguists, both traditional and modern. There are exceptions, among them Ross’s (1973) work on what he dubbed slifting, Emonds’s (1976, §2.9) general investig- ation, Culicover’s (1980, 1992), Stowell’s (1987), and Lapointe’s (1991) work on the internal syntax of such clauses, and McCawley’s (1982, 1987, 1989) attempts to tackle the issue of how such constituents should be rep- resented, but little is currently known about the syntax and semantics of this class of constructions. I thank Daniel Büring, Jorge Hankamer, Bill Ladusaw, Jim McCloskey, Paul Postal, and Geoff Pullum for numerous key insights and observations. The work was also greatly improved by the careful, detailed comments of the anonymous NLLT reviewers. My thanks also to Daniel Büring and Vera Lee-Schoenfeld for German data and judgments, to Line Mikkelsen and Matthias Kromann for the Danish data and many crucial observations about them, and to Naruemon Wannapaiboon for providing the Thai sentences and aiding me greatly in their analysis. Some of this work was presented at WCCFL 20 at USC. Any remaining mistakes are my responsibility alone. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20: 623–689, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 624 CHRISTOPHER POTTS This work is an attempt to begin to remedy the oversight by invest- igating, in detail, the syntax and semantics of one type of parenthetical expression, exemplified by the italicized material in (1). (1)a. Ames, as the FBI eventually discovered,wasaspy. ‘CP-As’ b. Ames stole important documents, as the FBI said he had. ‘Predicate-As’ c. The plums were delicious, as were the durians. ‘Predicate-As’ I call these clauses As-parentheticals or As-clauses. But despite the in- formal and English-specific name, one of the findings of this study is that clauses of the type in (1) are extremely common cross-linguistically; English As-clauses are by no means parochial constructions. I present data from Danish, German, and Thai that display the interesting and important properties of the As-clauses in (1). Understanding the construction, then, has implications well beyond English. I refer to the kind of As-clause in (1a) as ‘CP-As’, in light of the intuition that their gaps are clausal gaps. Similarly, (1b, c) involve ‘Predicate-As’. But these labels are for expository purposes only. Among my central claims is that (1a–c) involve a single, flexibly-typed morpheme. In con- trast, the as in (2), an adverbial-relativizer, is a fundamentally distinct beast from the as in (1). (2) Jody speaks German as Klaus speaks English – with a for- eigner’s accent. ‘Adjunct-As’ ‘Adjunct-As’ occasionally intrudes on the discussion, but only for purposes of comparison. Despite similarities with the As-causes in (1), and despite the cross-linguistic tendency to employ the same(-sounding) word to head both Adjunct-As and Predicate-/CP-As clauses, the semantics of Adjunct- As are fundamentally distinct. More importantly, as I show in section 2.4, they are not even parentheticals. The paper’s basic layout is as follows: Section 2 concentrates on the syntax of As-parentheticals, addressing both their internal structure and the syntactic relationship they bear to the sentence or clause from which they obtain their interpretation. Section 3 shifts attention to semantics; I provide lexical denotations for As-type morphemes that capture directly the fact that they conventionally implicate the truth of their complement. Throughout, my semantic treatment is guided by the syntactic results of section 2. Section 4 is an advertisement for the analysis developed in the THE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF AS-PARENTHETICALS 625 previous sections. I present some puzzles concerning the interaction of As- clauses with negative, tense, and modal operators, prominent among them being the ambiguity of (3). (3) Ames did not steal the documents, as the senators claimed. a. As-clause = the senators claimed that Ames did not steal the documents b. As-clause = the senators claimed that Ames stole the documents In (3b), the As-clause’s interpretation ‘ignores’ the negation in the initial declarative. The existence of this reading, alongside the ‘negated’ read- ing (3a), is a consequence of my treatment, as are a variety of intricate restrictions on its availability. A major lesson of this work is that parentheticals are useful probes into clause structure in general. Study of the interactions between As-clauses and the material around them, in conjunction with the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis, yields novel evidence for distinguishing negative morphemes from the locus of the semantic expression of negation (see section 4). Ad- ditionally, As-clauses reveal much about the conditions governing, among other things, Island extractions and variable binding (section 3.3.4). Another important finding is that As-clauses adjoin like regular, non- parenthetical adverbials; structurally, the two classes of expression are indistinguishable. It is the semantics of As-clauses that is responsible for the impression that they are syntactically separate from, and not semantic- ally integrated with, the linguistic material around them. Section 2.4 offers a preliminary suggestion that this is ultimately the explanation for their characteristic comma intonation (Emonds 1976, §II.9). It is important to stress, then, the following: on the present analysis, As-parentheticals require nothing nonstandard in the way of representations or semantic techniques; all the structures proposed here are linguistic trees in the sense of Partee et al. (1993, §18.3) and Rogers (1998, §3.2), and my semantic analysis is couched in a basic type-driven semantic framework. 2. (PURE)SYNTAX This section is a close look at the syntax of As-parentheticals. In sec- tions 2.1–2.2 I focus on the inner workings of As-clauses, motivating a movement analysis in which a null operator extracts to [Spec,CP]; As-morphemes are argued to be prepositions. Section 2.3 considers the syntactic relationship As-clauses bear to the material from which they ob- 626 CHRISTOPHER POTTS tain their interpretation. My conclusion is that they adjoin in the manner of regular, non-parenthetical adverbial modifiers. 2.1. A Movement Analysis A prominent feature of both Predicate- and CP-type As-clauses is their missing constituents, or gaps, seen clearly in the English examples in (1) above and the Thai and Danish examples in (4)–(5). (4) THAI a. Thu.rian a.roy yaa thii khonee.chian laai khon durians delicious, as C Asians many CLASS. ruu . know Durians are delicious, as many Asians know. b. Tam.ruat ca cap Clyde yaa thii phuak.khaw khuan ca police will arrest Clyde as C they should will tham . do The police will arrest Clyde, as they should. (5) DANISH a. Alger var spion, (ganske) som folketingsmedlemmerne Alger was spy (exactly) as parliament.members.DEF påstod . claimed Alger was a spy, (exactly) as the senators claimed. b. Politiets Efterretningstjeneste er i hælene på Bugsy, police’s investigation.service.DEF is in heels.DEF on Bugsy, som de burde være . as they should be The FBI is hot on Bugsy’s heels, as they should be. Two hypotheses about the nature of these gaps present themselves: either the structures involve movement of a (possibly null) element, or else they involve ellipsis. The goal of this section is to establish that the move- ment analysis is the correct one. In section 2.1.1, I compare As-clauses THE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF AS-PARENTHETICALS 627 with uncontroversial ellipsis cases, showing that As-clauses do not in general manifest properties typical of ellipsis. In sections 2.1.2–2.1.3, I present data from Syntactic Islands and (pseudo-) parasitic gaps that con- stitute positive evidence for movement. The issue of what actually extracts (whether as or a null element) is postponed until section 2.2. 2.1.1. Contrasts with Ellipsis Structures If the gaps in As-clauses result from ellipsis (or deletion), then one would expect them to display standard properties of ellipsis sites. In particular, the gap in As-clauses should be able to find its antecedent in a non-local phrase, as ellipsis gaps commonly do. But this expectation is not borne out. The constituent that supplies the gap’s interpretation must be the most local phrase of the appropriate type. The logic of this argument is supplied by the work of Williams (1977), Kennedy (1998, 1999, §2.4.3.2), and Kennedy and Merchant (2000, §2.1), who provide examples such as (6). In (6), the elided VP in the second sentence can be interpreted either locally, as in (6a), or non-locally, as in (6b).
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